She turned to him and laughed. "You can't expect devils to know what's what," she said, slipping her hand through his arm and throwing up her head in a kind of proud glee.
He smiled down at her. "Little treasure," he said, for a moment becoming conscious that this was a very bright thing he had got and was bringing home with him.
The carriage was hauled up through an opening between two cottages out of the sand on to the stones of the village street by a supreme last effort of the horses, and was dragged in great bumps across various defects through an open gate on the opposite side.
There was a yard with sheds, a plough, a manure heap, some geese, some hens, a pig, the two linden trees, and in between the linden trees behind wire netting a one-storied house like a venerable bungalow, which Herr Dremmel, on their drawing up in front of it, introduced to her.
"My house," he said, with a wave of the hand.
CHAPTER XIII
There followed a time of surprising happiness for Ingeborg. It was the happiness of the child escaped from its lessons and picnicking gloriously in freedom and unrebukedness. The widow, it is true, slightly smudged the brightness of the beginning by, as it were, dying hard. Her body clung to life—the life she had known, she lamented, for eight long months. She was the last, she explained, of the Herr Pastor's widows, who reached back in a rusty row to the days when he first came, elastic with youth, to cure the souls of Kökensee, and as she had stayed the longest it was clear she must be the best. She remained at the parsonage, dingily persistent, for several days on the pretext of initiating Ingeborg into the ways of the house; and each time Herr Dremmel, who seemed a little shy of embarking on controversy with her, mentioned trains, she burst in his presence into prayer and implored aloud on his behalf that he might never know what it was to be a widow. She did ultimately, however, become dislodged, and once she was gone there was nothing but contentment.
Ingeborg was young enough to think the almost servantless housekeeping a thing of charm and humour. Herr Dremmel was of the easiest unconcern as to what or when or if he ate. It was early summer, and there was only delight in getting up at dawn and pottering about the brick-floored kitchen before the daily servant came—a girl known to Kökensee as Müller's Ilse—and heating water, and making coffee, and preparing a very clean little breakfast-table somewhere in the garden, and decorating it with freshly picked flowers, and putting the butter on young leaves, and arranging the jar of honey so that a shaft of sunlight between the branches shone straight through it turning it into a miracle of golden light. It was the sort of breakfast-table one reads about in story books; and on its fragility Herr Dremmel would presently descend like some great geological catastrophe, and the whole in a few convulsed moments would be just crumbs and coffee stains. Then he would put on leggings and go off with Johann to his experimental fields, and she would give herself up eagerly to the duties of the day.
She could not talk at first to Ilse, a square girl with surprisingly thick legs, because though she went about always with a German grammar in one hand she found that what she had learned was never what she wanted to say. Ilse, whose skirt was short, did not wear stockings, and when Ingeborg by pointing and producing a pair had conveyed to her that it would be well if she did, Ilse raised her voice and said that she had no money to get a husband with but at least, and Gott sei Dank, she had these two fine legs, and if the Frau Pastor demanded that she should by hiding them give up her chances, then the Frau Pastor had best seek some girl on whom they grew crooked or lean, and who for those reasons would only be too glad to cover them up. Ingeborg, not understanding a word but apprehending a great objection, smiled benevolently and put the stockings away, and Ilse's legs went on being bare. They worked together in great harmony, for there could be no argument. Cut off from conversation, they sang; and Ingeborg sang hymns because her memory was packed with them, and Ilse sang long loud ballads, going through them slowly verse by verse in a sort of steady howl. The very geese paused on their way to the pond to listen anxiously.